Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a management approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the processes that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business.

Business process reengineering is also known as BPR, Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation, or Business Process Change Management.

Efficient and effective business processes are critical to any enterprise that hopes to maintain, or improve, its competitive position. Improvement in quality, time, and costs can result in increased profit. The way an enterprise structures and manages its business processes has a great impact on these outcomes.

 

Business processes are becoming more important as customers' expectations are increasing and there is a need to become focused on providing customer value. Simultaneously, time-based competition—shorter planning cycles, shorter lead time, shorter product development cycles, shorter product life cycles—is becoming prevalent. Many enterprises are not ready to meet the concurrent demands of customer-focused, time-based, and low-cost competition because key business processes are poorly structured.

 

Poorly structured processes often result from a history of neglect, rather than poor initial design. Few enterprises pay as much attention to process research and development as they do to product research and development. Consequently, their processes remain static while the environment of the enterprise changes. The traditional organization of business activities into separate functions such as sales, purchasing, inventory management, production, and distribution may be inadequate to support the new cross-functional requirements of the economic environment. Cross-functional requirements become important in a Just-in-Time (JIT) environment in an environment where global demands and rising customer expectations need to be satisfied along market lines. Implementing these changes requires redesigning an organization's business process(es).


(This article is excerpted from The Society of Management Accountants of Canada Strategic Management Accounting Practices series. Read the full article here.)

    Robert Rudy      Paradox Advisors
   Strategy, Operations, Improvement and  Technology